


dante is bad at stick figures, and no one will let him forget it

by Kirta



Category: The Cycle of Arawn/The Cycle of Galand - Edward W Robertson
Genre: Multi, Soulmate-Identifying Marks, Soulmates, are the carlons mallish or gaskan speaking?, follows the plot of The Great Rift to the end, spent Way Too Long on language shit, the kind where what you write on your skin appears on your soulmates', tho on further deliberation it's probably mallish, went w gaskan for purposes of this fic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-14
Updated: 2019-08-14
Packaged: 2020-08-23 10:10:30
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,203
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20241133
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kirta/pseuds/Kirta
Summary: Dante has two soulmates. One of them writes in a different language, and the other doesn't write at all, but they do draw. They spend the better part of twenty-five years doodling to each other.





	dante is bad at stick figures, and no one will let him forget it

**Author's Note:**

> This was another fic originally for polyshipweek 2019 on tumblr. Still figuring out how ao3 works from this side, and with two fandoms new to the archive apparently. idk. have fun y'all

Lira was three when she first understood the concept of soulmates. Mara, her sister, was five, and had just started getting little drawings on her own skin. She explained to Lira, with all the wisdom of an older sibling, that the gods had given her a friend to talk to, and that she’d meet them someday, and probably they would get married, because that seemed like the sort of thing you did with someone who was your soulmate. Lira had shrugged and accepted it at the time. Mara sounded like she knew what she was talking about. She was probably right. Lira started drawing on her own arm.

It was almost four years later when she finally found something on her arm that she hadn’t put there herself. A small eternity, for a kid. There was a circle and a few lines that wanted to be straight, and Lira had no idea what they meant. Neither did Mara, when Lira showed her, nor did their parents. One of the other guild fighters took a look and said it might be a person, poorly drawn. Lira knew how to draw stick figures, and she didn’t think this was a very good one. She drew a better one on her arm as an example.

\----------

Dante couldn’t remember a time when his right arm didn’t have some small doodle on it. When he was four years old and already asking too many questions, his father had explained the idea of a soulmate to him. Dante digested the explanation for twenty minutes before finding a charcoaled stick and trying to draw himself on his left arm. A few hours later, a stick figure person with a sword appeared on his right arm.

Dante’s stick figures never got much better. He kept trying, and usually he got some response from whoever was on the other end, but he had a hard enough time drawing on a piece of flat paper. About six months after Dante’s first drawings, a bird appeared on his arm. It was notable both for being a bird (and a fairly recognizable one at that) and for being on his left arm, where Dante usually put his own drawings. Larsin was gone again, so he didn’t have anyone to ask about it. Dante had been pretty sure his soulmate was left-handed, but either that wasn’t true or he had more than one soulmate, and he didn’t know if either of those were allowed. He drew a tree for the bird to sit in.

\----------

Blays thought for a long time about what he should draw for his soulmates first. He knew he had two of them, because they always drew on different arms and one of them was clearly much better at it. His mother had told him about a boy she’d grown up with who had had four soulmates, which seemed to Blays like far too many to keep straight. He wasn’t sure why he went with the bird, but after a few minutes a tree appeared below it, and he figured it was the right choice.

He had no idea what to do with the words when they appeared. They started on his right arm, so they were probably from the one he’d started calling Right, or, sometimes, Good Stick Figures. He showed them to his mom, but she couldn’t read either, so it didn’t do him much good. Left, or Bad Stick Figures, didn’t seem to know what to do with the letters either, and had drawn a bad dragon in what looked like some kind of berry juice. Blays drew himself in fighting the dragon. Good Stick Figures tried to draw themselves in, too, and mostly managed it, which was impressive since they seemed to be extremely left-handed and had to draw that with their right.

\---------

Lira tried writing to her soulmates once or twice, but they never replied with words, so she figured they just couldn’t read. She stuck to pictures for the most part. Sometimes, the three of them drew out whole stories on their arms and chests and legs in ink and dirt and charcoal, though it happened less often as they got older. Once, Tree (the first of her soulmates to reply) tried to write a couple words to her, but she couldn’t understand them. Her mother told her it was probably Mallish, not their own Gaskan. Lira wasn’t sure how she’d be able to talk to them if they ever met, if that was the case.

Lira’s father died when she was seventeen. He found the wrong end of another mercenary’s blade, like so many of the guild fighters did eventually. Lira spent all that night shut in her room, drawing on her skin in charcoal that smeared badly any time she moved._ My dad just died_, she wrote, even though she knew they wouldn’t understand. They drew with her long into the night, though, in a way they hadn’t since Lira had been twelve.

\-----------

When Dante first learned how to write, he thought he’d finally be able to have a conversation with his soulmates. It didn’t work out, and he was a bit disappointed, but he went back to doodling bad stick figures. He’d taken to calling the others Words and Birds in his head, and wondered where they were from.

When he was sixteen, he met a boy named Blays on the Bressel waterfront. They both kept their sleeves down and did not ask about soulmates. Dante studied in Bressel’s great library and more than once ran out of space on his pages of notes and dashed them onto his arm instead. Words usually added a run of question marks to Dante’s other arm. Birds drew little things in between the lines.

After the alley fight and Dante’s first shadowsphere, he bound up a deep cut to Blays’s forearm and caught a glimpse of familiar handwriting. Dante was quiet when they got back to their room, wondering if he’d imagined it. Blays was silent for his own reasons. Dante knew the shadowsphere had shaken Blays’s trust, and honestly wasn’t sure if bringing up the idea that they were maybe possibly soulmates would make things better or worse. He was leaning ‘worse’.

\-----------

Blays sat by the pond and drew a fish on his arm in mud. He heard Dante laugh behind him. He turned. “Is that a spellbook or a joke book?”

“It’s not a spellbook,” Dante said almost absently. He was looking at his arm, grinning. He dug around for a handful of soft red berries and a stick and started drawing. Blays lost interest and looked back down at his own arm, considering drawing dicks somewhere just to see if it got a reaction out of the others.

He watched a bigger, toothier fish take shape in red beside his mud-fish. “Wait, _you’re_ Bad Stick Figures?!”

Dante looked up. The red fish stopped growing. “I’m what?” Blays held out his arm. Dante looked at it, then down at his own. “Oh. Wait, what do you mean ‘Bad Stick Figures’?”

“Your stick figures have always been shit,” Blays informed him.

“Oh come on, they’re not _that_ bad.”

“Yes they are. Believe me, I’ve been looking at them since I was four.”

Dante crossed his arms. “Fine. I’m Bad Stick Figures. Who’s the person on our right arm?”

“Good Stick Figures, of course,” Blays said. “What do you two keep writing to each other, anyway? I can’t read any of it.” He almost didn’t feel embarrassed to say it, too distracted by actually meeting one of his soulmates. Or, realizing he’d been running around with him for two months.

Dante shrugged. “Usually I’m just writing notes to myself. I don’t know what language they’re writing in, but it’s not Mallish.”

“Oh,” Blays sat back. “Well that’s not very helpful.” Dante snorted and finished drawing his fish. Blays looked sidelong at him. “You don’t seem very surprised by this.”

Dante didn’t look up. “Should I be?”

“I mean, a little bit of enthusiasm at least might be nice.”

Dante hesitated, his stick dripping red berry juice onto his arm. “I saw your arm back in Bressel, with my notes on it.”

Blays felt his jaw drop. “And you didn’t say anything?”

Dante looked at him. “You didn’t exactly seem interested in talking to me just then.”

Blays grumbled a bit, but Dante was right. He wouldn’t have reacted well to the reveal that night. “You’re still bad at stick figures,” Blays said, and went back to stabbing fish.

\-------

Lira was nineteen when the drawings changed. They seemed more coordinated, like there was a plan to it, and not just three separate minds building off what the others drew. After a few months of wondering, she found words from Tree on her arm. They were in Gaskan. _Is this the language correct?_ She found a stick of charcoal.

_Yes. My name is Lira. Who are you?_

\-------

As soon as Dante had learned enough Gaskan from Nak to form a complete sentence, he wrote to their other soulmate. He was pretty sure he had messed up the grammar somehow in his eagerness, but he didn’t think it mattered too much.

Blays looked up from his own arm when Lira’s answer appeared. “What does it say?” he demanded.

Dante stared at the words for a very long minute, trying to translate. “Her name is Lira,” he said at last. He grinned at Blays. “She wants to know our names.” He picked up his charcoal and wrote out his name. He went to add Blays’s name, but Blays grabbed the charcoal first.

“What’s mine look like in Gaskan?”

\-------

When Blays actually sat down and tried to learn the script, he thought it was actually quite easy. Before too long, he was conversing with Dante and Lira through their skin with ease. Lira poked fun at them sometimes, when their Gaskan leaned a bit too Mallish in structure, but it didn’t last long, living in the middle of a Gaskan-speaking city. 

It was nice to actually get to know the people he’d been trading pictures with all his life. Lira was apparently a mercenary in the Carlons and a few years older than Dante. Unfortunately, even when she made it up to Gask for a job, she was never in the same area as Blays and Dante, so for five years they knew her only through the words on their arms.

\-------

Lira lay in the wreck of the _Notus_ and wrote on her arm in her own blood. It was the only thing even remotely ink-like in reach of her and her broken leg. Her hand was shaking and she could barely see for the smoke, but she managed to scrawl a legible _Goodbye_ before she passed out.

\-------

Dante and Blays hadn’t heard much from Lira in a week, being rather busy with their own problems. Dante knew they were on the same river, but that was about it. The last he’d heard, Lira had been five days downriver in quiet waters.

There was nothing they could do about her _Goodbye._ It looked like it was written in blood. She didn’t respond to any of their panicked scribbles and Dante began to fear the worst. He was even less inclined than usual to stop to search the grounded ship for survivors, at least until Blays brought up the uncomfortable possibility that it was Lira’s ship. They rowed over to the wreck tense and silent, and when they found her, finally, Dante almost wished they hadn’t.

She pulled through, though, and at long last saw the faces of her soulmates. She looked between them when she woke. “This was really not how I imagined meeting you two.” Blays laughed.

\--------

Blays held his arm up to the dim light of the oil lamp beside their bed in the house they’d claimed in Dollendun. _Shut up. Please_, it read, in Dante’s hand. Blays reached for something to write with on the side table, jostling Lira.

_Come up and join us_, he wrote back. Lira grabbed the charcoal out of Blays’s hand and wrote on her own arm. 

_Don’t you dare try to tell me tea is a soup._

\--------

Lira watched Cassinder charge ahead of his army. Straight at Dante. No time for messages. She ran forward, knife in one hand, sword in the other.

\--------

Dante’s arms were too bare when he woke after the battle. He knew he wouldn’t see anything on his right arm, not anymore, after what he’d done, but he had hoped for Blays’s familiar script on his left at least.

No matter how many times he wrote on his own arm, he got no answer for three years. Even then, it was a short, angry _fuck off_, and then silence again.

\------

Blays and Minn weren’t soulmates. Blays had run from his, and Minn’s had been left back in Gallador. It hadn’t ended well for her there.

They were happy together anyway.

\-------

Potential disaster has a remarkable way of bringing people back together when they least expect or want it, but some things can never quite be fixed, not in the way you’d want.

But some things never really go away, either.


End file.
